Will Australians Get Their Kicks on Route 39?

Feb. 24, 2014 10:18 p.m. ET

Some Australians are trying to rebrand a remote highway as Australia’s Route 66. WSJ’s Rachel Pannett reports.

WEST WYALONG, Australia—Not many people here get their kicks on Route 39.
Grain silos rising from flat terrain vie with open-cut mines for the attention of truckers who use the 660-mile Newell Highway. A kangaroo occasionally jumps across the arrow-straight road. Among the most unfortunately named districts hereabouts is Bland Shire.
Jeff Stien has a plan to change things. A member of the Newell Highway Promotions Committee, he wants to rebrand the road, which motorists think is one of eastern Australia’s worst, as Route 66 and make it a destination for lovers of Americana.
The committee is seeking government funding to promote the road, which connects the southern state of Victoria with Queensland in the northeast, —as a tourist highway, complete with brand-new Route 66 signage, hoping to shake its image as a service road for travelers headed elsewhere.
The highway proposal has been written into the Riverina Destination Management Plan, —a document that aims to revive the fortunes of more than a dozen towns along the route as drought and a downturn in commodity prices have made life difficult. Promoters plan to take their case to the New South Wales Parliament in March.
The highway-promotions committee is taking inspiration from the natural, nostalgic and kitschy attractions along the two-lane U.S. Route 66—heralded in song and story—from live rattlesnakes to cactus candy and Indian blankets, along with such geological marvels as limestone caverns and vast deserts.

Attractions along Australia’s Route 39, which backers want to rebrand as Route 66, include a giant guitar. Narrandera Visitor Information Centre

If all goes well, drivers will be stopping at an observatory that helped broadcast the Apollo moon landings, seeking relics of one of the biggest U.S. Pacific air bases in World War II and breaking out their blue suede shoes next January at a festival for Elvis Presley’s birthday.
Never mind that the proposed route’s namesake is a faded jewel in the U.S. highway system that officially ceased to exist in 1985. Nobody on the highway promotions committee ever traveled Route 66, “winding,” as the Bobby Troup song says, “from Chicago to L.A. more than 2,000 miles all the way.”
“It’s on my bucket list,” said Mr. Stien of his plans to drive the American road. Contacting tourism authorities in the U.S. to see if they’re on board is also on his “to do” list, though he recently helped mastermind a sister-city partnership including Bland, the Oregon town of Boring and Scotland’s Dull.

What’s along the route now doesn’t quite measure up.
In Mirrool, a dot on the landscape about 300 miles from Sydney that is home to more dogs than people, fun means the annual Silo Kick Challenge: an event started by accident in the 1970s after an end-of-season football drinking session that has grown into an annual pilgrimage for footballers.
Every October, around 400 people gather to watch strapping blokes attempt to kick an Australian football—similar in shape to an American football—over three 100-foot grain silos that tower over the tiny town. The rules are simple enough: clear the silos and the 2,000 Australian dollar (U.S. $1,800) winner’s check is yours. Runners-up get the chance to drown their sorrows at the local pub, —the only commercial building left in a pioneer town that once also had a billiard parlor and grocery store.
“It’s been a great tourist attraction for the little village,” said Des Delaney, president of the kick challenge. “It’s keeping the place alive.”
Mirrool residents—all 27 of them—go by nicknames like Zipper, Weetbix, Billy-can and Bucket. Even the village pub, —a 100-year-old, two-story redbrick hotel dubbed “The Grand Old Lady of the Highway,” has a story: A wild storm ripped its roof off in 2012 as patrons kept on drinking downstairs.

Animals at a wildlife sanctuary along Route 39 Lake Cowal Foundation

For some along the highway, like Beth McMeeken, 74, and Roy Chaplin, 72, the key to the future is living in the past. They have made their Jerilderie home a museum of Victorian antiques—including the bank safe robbed by outback legend Ned Kelly during a rampage through the town in 1879.
“The world’s full of tin foil and plastic wrap,” said Ms. McMeeken, opening a pantry full of old kitchen tools. “We show children real things that weren’t made to be thrown away.”
Walking into the Cameo Inn Motel restaurant in West Wyalong is a fabulously eccentric experience: an ode to all things Americana, with stars including Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Humphrey Bogart adorning the walls, along with a signed photo of George Clooney.
Like many Australian mining towns, West Wyalong has been living the boom in recent years as global resources company Barrick Gold Corp. ABX.T +0.99% Barrick Gold Corp. Canada: Toronto $23.52 +0.23 +0.99% Feb. 24, 2014 4:20 pm Volume : 3.36M P/E Ratio N/A Market Cap $27.12 Billion Dividend Yield 0.94% Rev. per Employee N/A 02/14/14 Barrick Cuts Gold Reserves 02/13/14 Major Gold Miners Slash Reserv… 02/13/14 What WSJ Canada Is Reading Thu… More quote details and news » ABX.T in Your Value Your Change Short position developed an open-pit gold mine nearby. At the peak of the mine’s construction, the town housed up to 2,000 miners at a time, which led to a degree of complacency among hoteliers, Cameo Inn owner Gail Platz said.
“With the mine, it’s been an amazing thing for the town. But it’s not going to be there forever and a day,” Ms. Platz said from behind a motel counter that showed a rack full of keys to vacant rooms. “The town needs to come up with other ideas.”
Not everyone is sold on Mr. Stien’s plan. A young Dutch couple arrived off the dusty plains between Jerilderie and Narrandera in New South Wales one evening in late December, declaring “There’s nothing out here,” said Murray Hall, who owns the New Criterion hotel in Narrandera. “Our challenge is to get people to stay more than one night.”
The route’s proponents argue there’s little to lose when your current route marker is 39. Australian highways are numbered 1 through 99. Budget airlines have captured a large chunk of travelers who once plied the route.
At an Elvis festival in January in the rural town of Parkes—one of the wackier examples of Americana along the route—Carol Mahon, 65, gave the proposal a thumbs up.
“It’s a good highway, it takes you to a lot of places,” she said, sitting by a camper she and her husband, Jeffrey, a retired Route 39 truckie, take on highway tours. “Australia’s not isolated,” she added. “It’s just other people don’t really know where we are.”
Write to Rachel Pannett at rachel.pannett@wsj.com

More: Will Australians Get Their Kicks on Route 39?